Saturday, February 8, 2014

Subterranean Salt? (Sermon - Matthew)

How many of you know that Cleveland is home to a
huge salt mine?Cargill owns a mine 1800
feet under Lake Erie and four miles out from downtown. This Cleveland mine and
another out by Fairport Harbor combine to produce a huge portion of the salt
mined in North America.

And
have any of you ever heard of the Salt Cathedral in Poland?I wouldn’t know anything about this one [show
image] but for my daughter having spent a college semester in the Czech
Republic.While she was there, she was
able to travel quite a bit, and on a trip to Poland she learned about this
enormous salt mine, now closed, in which the workers left quite the record of
their presence, carving out rooms and sculptures and an entire chapel, which is
often in use for weddings!Imagine
getting married in a salt mine!Even
those chandeliers are made of salt, salt that’s been treated until it is so
fine that it looks like glass.And the
sculptures, like this one of The Last Supper [shpw], look like granite – but they,
too, are salt.

A
salt mine, whether it remains in its original state, as the Cleveland mines do,
or has been transformed by Polish miners, is a pretty spectacular sight.Huge deposits of salt carved into rooms so
that miners can reach their goal – huge deposits far underground, in places
most of us don’t know exist.Huge
deposits of something we take completely for granted – I’m sure there are
several salt shakers in your homes – but which, until about 100 years ago, was
a product of great value, difficult and expensive to attain.

I
want you to think about the church for a moment.Think about the church, this church, as
salt.At one time, it was a beacon of
great value.A tremendous amount of
money, and energy, and time, went into the building of this church, starting
with this Foster Hall as its first sanctuary.Back in the 1960s, and in the 1860s, churches like ours were deemed to
be of momentous importance.They popped
up in neighborhoods all over the place, and were filled with people who were
called to flavor their communities with the salt of God’s love.

Have
we now reached the point where churches like ours, like salt, are taken for
granted?People expect to see them, and
most of the time they walk right on by, just as we expect to find salt in our
kitchens and on our tables without taking any notice of them.When folks think they need a church, say for
a funeral or for a wedding, they expect us to be here, just as we expect to
find a salt shaker when we reach for one at the dinner table.

What
has happened to our sense that we are salt for the world?Have we become more like underground deposits
of salt than like salt scattered across the globe?

Deposits
of salt, by themselves, are not of much use to us.They go unnoticed – until just a few years
ago, I had no idea that Lake Erie’s waters covered salt mines – and even if
they are transformed inside, as Poland’s salt mine was, very few people realize
that they are there.Salt has to be
brought out into the open before it becomes a commodity useful in preserving
and preparing food. Useful in favoring
the world.

And
once it’s in the open, salt plays amazing roles in human relationships.Perhaps even in human relationships with
God.That’s what both history and the
Bible tell us.

There’s
a wonderful book entitled SALT. The nonfiction story of SALT is a whirlwind
tour through world history, through which the compound salt runs as a crucial,
savory thread.Salt lies at the bottom
of major world events: exploration, trade, currency, revolution, warfare.SALT could probably be turned into a smash
hit television miniseries, filled with travel and adventure and danger and
romance and royalty.

Salt,
above ground and out in the open, creates transformation.Mine salt, and people start looking for more,
and start to discover new possibilities.Sprinkle salt around, and revolutions start: people see that life can be
different than it is.

What
does that mean for us?If we stay as we
are, we are like a salt mine under the lake – no one knows that we are
here.If we create something beautiful
here in our own church and keep it here, we’re like the Polish salt mine – an
intriguing place for tourists and brides, but not an exciting force in the
world.BUT – if we mine our salt, if we
dig deep into scripture and prayer and worship, we will start to discover
possibilities that have never occurred to us.And if we start salting our neighborhood, perhaps a revolution will
begin, will begin with a vision of new life and energy on Lake Shore Boulevard.

Salt
was a valuable commodity long before Jesus’ time, and a valuable commodity in Jesus’ time.And it’s a commodity with a specifically Biblical
history.Did you know that in the Old
Testament, in the Book of Numbers (18:19), God refers to temple sacrifices as a
sign of God’s covenant with them, as a sign of the “salt covenant?”And that in the Book of Leviticus (2:13), God
instructs the people, through Moses, saying, “You shall not omit from your
grain-offerings the salt of the covenant with your God; with all your offerings
you shall offer salt.”Salt was from the
earliest times of the life of the Hebrew people a sign of God’s promises to
them and of their reverence for God; salt, that valuable and hard-won
commodity, was a sign of the love of God and of relationship with God.

Those
Biblical allusions would have been well known to the people to whom Jesus
spoke, and the people to whom Matthew wrote. One of the important things to
know about the writer whom we call Matthew is that he seems to have been a Jew
intent upon convincing his largely Jewish audience that Jesus was indeed the
messiah promised in scripture.Matthew
spends a great deal of time on Jewish customs and scriptural passages, making
all sorts of connections between Jesus and earlier writings.Some of these connections we might not
recognize right away.We know, for
instance, that salt is important.We
know that while we take it for granted, not so long ago it could not be taken
for granted at all.But we may not
realize that in Jewish life, salt was asign: a sign of God’s covenantal
relationship with God’s people, a sign of God’s presence and promise of love
and care.The word “salt” and all that it
meant was probably obvious to those who listened to Jesus, and to those who
listened to or read the words of Matthew, but we ourselves have to give it some
thought.

And
what is it Jesus saysabout salt?In our reading today, he’s still up on the
mountain, preaching the words we know as the Sermon on the Mount, and in The
Message translation, which we read this morning, he says, “You’re here to be
salt-seasoning.” Interestingly, in the NRSV, the translation we usually used,
he says, “You are the salt of the earth.”You ARE.Or, “you ARE here TO
BE.”Present tense.[1]Not “you will be” or “you might be” or “you
could be.”But you ARE.Already.

Imagine
what those words meant to Jesus’ listeners.Matthew’s listeners.They already
knew what salt meant: God’s presence.God’s covenant.God’s love.Now they know something else: They – we – are
God’s presence and covenant and love to others.We ARE the salt of the earth.

Notice something else that Jesus
tells them: “I come not to demolish the law or the prophets, but to complete
them.”More evidence that Jesus is
paying attention to Jewish life – the law, those commandments God gave Moses on
another mountain long before – but expanding that law.Not throwing it out at all, but saying
instead: You are the salt who will help the make the love which is the foundation
of the law known.And Jesus is paying
attention to the prophets, those who proclaim God’s justice, those who clarify
what we are to do: Jesus says:You are salt;
bring out God-flavors in this world.

And
how, I ask you again, will we do that?Not by leaving God’s gift of love buried deep under the ground, like a
salt mine is.Not by allowing it to
remain beautiful but hidden, like the Salt Cathedral in Poland.

Not
merely by saying, “we have all that’s needed, here in this underground church
mine that we run.We can store God’s
love safely right here.”Not by saying,
“We’ve got something beautiful here, and we’ll wait for people to come and find
out – as people traveling in Eastern Europe happen upon the Salt Cathedral.”

No.Instead, we’re going to start asking
ourselves: Are we leaving the salt of God in a subterranean cavern today?Are we forgetting that subterranean salt is
for sharing with the world?

Our charge comes from the God who made salt a
sign of promise ro God’s Old Testament people. Our charge comes from Jesus, who
took that sign and said, “You are the ones!You are the salt!”Our charge
comes from Matthew, who wrote a gospel so that Jesus’ words would echo across
the centuries.Our charge comes from the
Spirit, who says to us:

Mine the salt!Bring it up to the surface and scatter it around a world in need of the
taste of the Lord!Remember that salt glistens
with the presence and promise of God – and so do you.For you ARE the salt of the earth and you ARE
the light of the world.Amen

2 comments:

I love the paragraph when you say people expect the church to just be here...for a wedding or a funeral. It is so true and I think those in the congregation I serve are mostly worried that the church will be there for their funeral.

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About Me

Married and mom of three.
Pastor in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
Spiritual Director in the Ignatian tradition.
Adjunct college instructor.
Writer, photographer, canoer, hiker, voracious reader ~ and someone who knows the beach is the best.
Email me at maryrcraigatsbcglobaldotnet.